218 TRANSACTIONS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. [Vou. VIIL 
all on the very verge of suffering even in years of plenty, and prevents 
them from laying up anything to tide them over years of scarcity. If 
their condition were such that in good years they could get a little ahead, 
then when the bad years came they could draw on that as a resource. 
This would not save them from hardship, but it would save them from 
starvation. But as things are, the vast majority have no such resource. 
Even in the best years they have all they can do to live and support their 
families in the barest possible way, without laying by a rupee for a rainy 
day. The result is, when their crops fail, they are helpless. For a while 
they manage to keep the wolf of famine from the door by selling their cow, 
if they have one, their plough bullock, and such bits of simple furniture 
from their poor dwellings, or such cooking utensils or such articles of 
clothing as they can find a purchaser for at any price. Then, when the 
last thing is gone that can be exchanged for even an anna or a handful of 
grain, there is nothing left for them except to sit down in their desolate 
homes, or wander out into the fields and die. This is the history of thou- 
sands and millions of the Indian people in times of famine. If the poor 
sufferers are so fortunate as to be received by the government at the famine 
relief works, where, in return for exacting labour in breaking stone or some- 
thing of the kind, they are supplied with means to buy sufficient food to 
sustain life, then the hardiest of them survive until the rains come, when, 
with depleted strength, they go back to their stripped homes, and, bare- 
handed, begin as best they can the task of raising a new crop and support- 
ing such members of their families as may be left. Here we have the real 
cause of famines in India. As an eminent writer on Indian economics 
has said, famines in India are ‘‘only the exceptional aggravation of a 
normal misery.”’ 
The truth is, the poverty of India is something that we can have little 
conception of, unless we have actually seen it, as alas! I have. Lest I 
should seem to exaggerate, let me cite some facts and figures from author- 
ities that cannot be questioned. 
Sir William Hunter, one of the most candid of writers, the distin- 
guished historian of India, and for many years director-general of Indian 
statistics, declared that 40,000,000 of the people of India are in the con- 
dition seldom or never to be able fully to satisfy their cravings of hunger. 
Lord Lawrence, a Governor-General of India, said in 1864, that ‘‘the 
mass of the people were so miserably poor that they had barely the means 
of subsistence”? even in years when there was no drought. Mr. A. O. 
Hume, Secretary to the Government of India in the Agricultural Depart- 
ment, wrote in 1880: ‘‘Except in very good seasons, multitudes, for months 
in every year, cannot get sufficient food for themselves and their families.”’ 
